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Tuesday, 22 April 2008

The final area of my talent management workshop I have been asked to explain more fully is employer branding.

From a strategic HCM / talent management perspective, this is about two things: firstly, differentiating the organisation from others, and secondly, communicating this differentiation. It's not about the colour of the stationery (although purple can apparently help).

Richard Donkin wrote an interesting article on e-recruitment in the FT recently. However, I think his most important observation related to some potential recruits' reactions to employers' recruitment web sites:

"They all say the same things about themselves," said one graduate, "Perhaps they actually are all the same."

Tamara Erickson and Lynda Gratton referred to these as 'signature practices' in their Harvard Business Review article, What it Means to Work Here last year:

"It's the ability to express to current and potential employees what makes the organization unique. Companies with highly engaged employees articulate their values and attributes through 'signature experiences'--visible, distinctive elements of the work environment that send powerful messages about the organization's aspirations and about the skills, stamina, and commitment employees will need in order to succeed there."

These practices can be placed at the centre of the organisation's employer brand.

Writing at the Internal Comms Hub, Richard Mosley makes some good suggestions for identifying Your Organisation's Unique Brand Values: the unique properties of an organisation that can form its organisation capability / signature experiences / employer brand / employee value proposition, for example, by considering its personality:

"If the organization were represented by a single person, what type of person would that be? (It often helps to start with a few iconic examples, like Marks & Spencer, Nike or McDonalds to warm people up.) Once people have entered the spirit of this exercise you can also ask a series of more specific questions like: What kind of car would they drive? What kind of paper would they read? What kind of pets would they keep? etc."

It is through working with your executive teams on exercises like these that will ensure that you are able to offer clear differences between your and other organisations, and that you can attract the talent your organisation wants.

I think translating this differentiation into your employer brand is then comparatively easy.

A good example is Yahoo's internal branding as a 'Life Engine'.

This was developed as an employer brand at the same time as becoming a focus for corporate branding. To external users, Life Engine suggests all the ways in which Yahoo! functions as a universal guide. To employees, it encompasses this meaning, plus all the ways in which working at Yahoo! 'powers' all other facets of their lives, and provide a rationale for the provision of life insurance, free lattes etc.

In addition, employees are encouraged to tailor the proposition to their own needs. So upon the brand's rollout, employees were sent a customisable license plate frame that read: 'Yahoo!: My ______ Engine'. Employees completed this to refer to what they personally got from their job and career at Yahoo! (for example, HRD Libby Sartain's plate said: 'Yahoo! My FunPlace2Work Engine').